Speaker：Amy Catalinac [the Department of Politics, New York University]

Date：July 3, 2024／15:30‐17:30 (JST)

Location：Room 549 on the 5th floor of Akamon General Research Bldg.
　　　　　http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_j.html

Language：English

Target : Open to the public

Abstract：Japan is the fourth largest economy in the world and an important ally of the United States. Yet its politics are highly anomalous: it has been ruled almost continuously by a single party since that party's formation in 1955. My book offers a new theory, group-based clientelism, that can account for this puzzle. The theory holds that under the right institutional conditions, democratically-elected politicians will be able to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters in their electoral districts. By this, I mean they will be able to tie the amount of central government resources groups of voters receive to the level of electoral support they provide. I further argue that in Japan's case, the sheer dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party has allowed politicians to pit groups of voters against each other in a competition for resources, what I call a tournament. Leveraging a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data over the thirty five-year period from 1980 to 2014, I show that tournaments have been a key component of LDP electoral strategies since 1980. The book provides a new lens through which we can understand many facets of Japanese politics, such as the LDP's longevity, the weakness of the opposition, the source of internal conflicts in the LDP, the truncated effect of Japan's 1994 electoral reform, and discrepancies in what voters want and what the LDP provides.

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Speaker：Paul Schuler [Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Arizona]

Date：July 11, 2024／15:00‐17:00 (JST)

Location：Room 104, Conference Room 2, 1F, Institute of Social Science, Hongo Campus, the University of Tokyo
　　　　　https://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/guide/

Language：English

Target : Open to the public

Moderator：Masaaki Higashijima（UTokyo)

Abstract：Why do regimes and parties often promote individuals to represent or "personify" them? In the context of political parties and regimes, why do they frequently promote personality cults as branding tools? While historians suggest that personality cults have unique legitimating powers, political science downplays the legitimating role of cults. We theorize that symbolic leaders serve a specific psychological purpose. In particular, they "anthropomorphize" groups, thereby increasing loyalty and emotional connection to those groups. To test this logic, we use a unique lab experiment to test the impact of the human face in generating heightened 1) attachment to a group and 2) in-group favoritism. To do so, we adapt the widely used "minimal groups" experimental paradigm to test a "minimal face" model of group identification. While preliminary results do not show an effect on resources distribution, they do show that personifying groups increases the cohesion of the group. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these findings for future research on personality cults.

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Speaker：Iwao Hirose [McGill University]

Date：July 16, 2024／15:00‐16:40 (JST)

Location：Room 549 on the 5th floor of Akamon General Research Bldg.
　　　　　http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_j.html

Language：Japanese

Target : Open to the public

Abstract：One of the theoretical issues in Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies is concerned with whether disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) should be measured by incidence or prevalence. My main claim is that DALYs can be measured by neither because the disvalue of years of life lost (YLL) cannot be attributed to a particular time. I will argue for this claim by elucidating the nature of comparativism, the philosophical theory underlying YLL.

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